"L. de Ponty's Wagon"

THE LIBERTINE LIBRETTIST (292 pp.)--April FitzLyon -- Abelard-Schuman ($3.75).

At 36, Lorenzo da Ponte was not only a fop but a flop. As Poet to the Imperial Theaters in Vienna, it was his duty to write librettos for "great composers," but Da Ponte had muffed the job. In 1785 he decided to collaborate with "an almost unknown, second-rate composer" named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Joseph II was shocked by such folly, but eventually, the amiable Emperor gave his approval. The new opera was Le Nozze di Figaro. So began the greatest collaboration in operatic history. To this day, says British Biographer April FitzLyon, nobody quite knows why "the facile, mediocre poet, the very inexperienced dramatist, should be the man who, above all others, succeeded in providing Mozart with the perfect framework for his music." One possible explanation is that a better poet than Da Ponte might have been less willing to bow to Mozart's stern dictum: "In an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music." It is the usual fate of the librettist to be forgotten in favor of the composer, but Da Ponte deserves to be remembered--not only because of his skillful service to Mozart, but because of the outrageous and fascinating life he led.

Priest to Poet. He was born (1749) in the Venetian town of Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto). His parents were Jews; his original name was Emanuele Conegliano. But his father changed the family faith, and Emanuele took the names of his baptizer. Bishop Lorenzo da Ponte. Aided by the bishop. Da Ponte became a Roman Catholic deacon.

"Handsome, intelligent, ardent." Da Ponte was also totally irreligious, unscrupulous and dishonest. Of the three Venetian rules--"A little Mass in the morning, a little gamble in the afternoon, and a little lady in the evening"--he paid lip service to the first, indulged rarely in the second, concentrated wholeheartedly on the third. While priest of San Luca in Venice, he took as his mistress Angioletta Bellaudi, a married woman who had been little better than a prostitute since the age of ten. Their first child barely missed being born on a sidewalk, with Father da Ponte probably acting as midwife ("The kind of incident that happens every day," he said). Ignoring a reprimand by the vicar-general, Da Ponte and Angioletta next opened a brothel--Da Ponte, "still in his cassock, played the violin."

When the Foundling Hospital found itself saddled with three children of the union, the authorities lost patience. Charged with "public concubinage and rapto di donna onesta" (abduction of a respectable woman), Da Ponte was sentenced to 15 years' banishment from Venice.

He arrived in Austria with nothing except "a little vocabulary" of amorous German words which he had picked up in the arms of an innkeeper's wife at the border. Da Ponte boldly demanded the post of Poet to the Theaters. Asked by the Emperor how many plays he had written, Da Ponte for once gave an honest reply: "None, Sire." The Emperor was impressed. "Good, good! Then we shall have a virgin muse," he said.

Casanova to Bourgeois. The virgin muse went briskly to work, chopping up other people's plays. Good as he was at plundering and plagiarizing, only three of his numerous works--Figaro, Don Giovanni. Cost fan Tutte--were fortunate enough to fall into the hands of a musical genius and make the name of Lorenzo da Ponte immortal. Figaro, based on Beaumarchais' play, was Mozart's idea; Cost fan Tutte's origin is unknown; but Don Giovanni, "the opera of all operas," was both an adaptation of a famed Spanish play and something of a musical autobiography of Da Ponte himself. Blasphemy, sacrilege and adultery--the renegade priest knew them by heart. Some say that Da Ponte's friend, the libidinous Casanova, also had a hand in Don Giovanni, but all that can be said for certain is that Da Ponte wrote it while "a lovely young girl of 16," his housekeeper's daughter, was staying with him, and "would come to my room whenever I rang the bell, which truth to tell was pretty often, especially when it seemed that my inspiration was beginning to cool."

Emperor Joseph's death wrote finis to Da Ponte's sinecure; Mozart's death ended his chances of further greatness. Penniless again, Da Ponte moved to London, where he worked as librettist to the King's Theater. At 43, "an age at which respectable married men take mistresses, and disreputable adventurers think about marriage," he married (or at least declared he had married) a young English girl and became the "bourgeois and almost respectable" father of five "more or less legitimate" children. His debts mounted; to escape them he fled to New York, landing with "a fiddle, a tea-urn, a carpet, a trunk full of books, and one box of fiddle-strings and suspenders."

Grocer to Educator. Having switched his faith to Anglican (or so he said), Da Ponte set up as a grocer; instead of writing odes to crowned heads, he now wrote "bills for sausages and dried prunes." In Philadelphia he opened a millinery store and ran a carrier service, affectionately known as "L. de Ponty's Wagon." One day he met Clement Clarke Moore, author of The Night Before Christmas and a trustee of Columbia College. Under Moore's patronage. Da Ponte founded the Manhattan Academy for Young Gentlemen ("Every attention," said the brochure, "will be paid to the morals of those entrusted to his care"). In 1825 Da Ponte became Columbia's first professor of Italian literature.

America, says Author FitzLyon, has much for which to thank Da Ponte. His boosting of things Italian, his passion for introducing startling novelties, led to the building of New York's first opera house (at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets). Da Ponte died in 1838 at 89 and his passing was a grand operatic spectacle: with his magnificent head upon a sea of pillows, he lavishly blessed a weeping troupe of opera singers who knelt around his bed. At the very last moment he summoned a Roman Catholic priest, who received the old Jewish-Catholic-Anglican back into the fold. Author FitzLyon doubts that this repentance was sincere: she is inclined to think that Da Ponte remembered in time the old Arabian proverb: "There are no fans in Hell."

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